Climate change: our human societies are constructed around certain climate patterns; changes will affect populations. Don't be an asshole.
Little John saying he thought it would be great if a certain percentage of people in Africa died of AIDS. I grew up with my fair share of disenchanted kids with too much leisure time and expendable income; don't go all fucking JD Salinger on me.
Best sporthorse registries, creating the best sporthorse registry; Continental SH? Photo inspections and cheating, color requirements WHAAT?
Greengate lady's comments (Good ol' boy system), Interstallion efforts
Just because it's well-reasoned doesn't make it true; horse books and conformation
Pretty and marketability, that TTouch lady and face shape and prejudice
Comparative conformation and movements (hunters, Arabians, QHs etc)
Non-selective registries; diseases in WBs vs diseases in QHs, Arabians, Tbs, etc.
White horses, cream horses, colors, reviewing reviews
Ideal horse for me
ADHD horses
Defining ADHD
Science science science
Dinosaurs
Child-rearing, public school, anti-Wikipedia, recess
Politics
Books; Harry Potter
Future life, mortality/immortality
Great teachers: Mrs. something 7th grade science, Mr. Carlyon 9th grade physics, Mr. Waldinger AP Bio, Mr. Johnston band (God bless you!), Dr. B
manners, values, weddings/marriage, metabolism of sugar/thyroid health, "sensitivity", evolution, human evo., Raffi tapes & Mr. Rogers
The unfortunate Jon and Kate + 8 GSD puppies
Quiet = nice?
Embracing fluttery silliness, a la Smitten Kitchen. "My affections are fleeting, alright?"
Stupid vs. % stupid activities. The human mind is beautiful.
"You believe that people are inherently stupid and bad, and are pleasantly surprised by individuals. I believe that the human race is a beautiful thing, and tend to be disappointed by individuals."
Beauty vs. art. Beauty = expensive. Loving beauty.
Seeing the world through pony-colored glasses.
Emotional Mad-libs, emotional inertia
Monday, February 23, 2009
Practice cake
I have a silly friend. Not prankster-silly, or foolish-silly...but the kind of silly that can forget to eat if she's busy. That is something that I can experience about as purely as red-green colorblindness (as a matter of interest, I have two of those sorts). The silliest part about her relationship with food is not even that she can forget to eat, but that she can forget to eat because she's too busy baking. On the weekends, this single young lady bakes cookies and cakes and everything in between. Fabulously, too!
Invariably, someone in your life, trying to encourage you to like chemistry, will tell you that it's just like cooking. However when chemistry precedes the first buddings of impulses to cook, as it does for me, one might have to say that cooking is like chemistry. And - are you ready, old school SAT fans? - cooking : chemistry :: baking : __?__.
(a) biochem
(b) torture
(c) recess
(d) organic
(e) physics
If you chose (d) organic, congratulations, you agree with me! The parts of organic chemistry that I enjoyed entailed imagining the interactions of molecules and their conformation, which are too eenie-weenie to actually watch or see. However organic chemistry lab was 3 hours per week for 30 total weeks (two semesters) of scheduled anxiety. Chemistry and cooking are similar because one follows a recipe. Organic chemistry and baking represent the same variation on that theme; if you do not follow the instructions to the letter, things go horribly, horribly awry. I am however, a realist on this point: a doughy cookie or an icing that falls apart into a gooey mess is not tragedy on the same scale as a deep lungful of fuming sulfuric acid or a botched sodium fusion test. Some days more than others I might not feel this way, but on the whole I am more leery of a chemically-ravaged esophagus than ravaged sweets.
While the fear of imminent injury made organic chemistry lab into a weekly cortisol-fest, baking gives me just that little thrill of "Oo gosh I hope this comes out yummy!" My friend got me hooked on baking. For two weeks it was Valentine's day cookies: chocolate-dipped marzipan conversation hearts and orange butter cookies dressed alternately in white chocolate, dark chocolate, or white icing were the favorites. With oodles of sprinkles, liberal use of red food coloring, and spiffy food coloring-markers, I ended up with plates and plates of pink chocolatey sugary be-sprinkled atrocities. Oh, they were hedonism itself, drizzled in chocolate.
This past weekend I made peanut butter cookies, but I halved the recipe (yes I used half an egg!) and didn't have any peanut butter chips so I used extra extra chocolate chips. They were superb. And in other news, the notoriously badly-calibrated oven in my kitchen was beautifully-behaved. I also tried the famous Epicurious chocolate cake recipe.
There are some things that you shouldn't do for the first time when it really counts. Jumping on horseback comes to mind, and so do birthday cakes. I have never made a cake of any kind, and Mommy's 45th birthday is in the first week of March, so I needed to practice. My goal is to bake a chocolate cake with a preppy feel: pink and green will be making a cameo appearance. For my practice cake I needed 2, 10x2" round cake pans, which not only did we not have at home, but could not be found at the grocery store. Boo. The grocery store did, however, have boulder-sized hunks of Callebaut. Memorably, my college dining service had used tremendous quantities of Callebaut for Valentine's day displays, and a thieving friend provided me about 1.5 pounds of her bittersweet spoils. In any event, my practice cake is square. I started after dinner and would have finished before the end of the Oscars had the dish washer not taken several eons to give me some clean measuring implements. I had to guesstimate on the amount of chocolate: I bought 0.75 pounds and needed 3 ounces. My mommy helped me with that math. The cakes came out beautifully and slipped cheerfully out of the square pans. I used canola non-stick spray and parchment paper on the inside of (2) 9x9x2" pans.
I chose a whipped cream filling and followed The Joy of Cooking's directions for "Stabilized Whipped Cream" and then added in 0.25 cups of smooshed raspberries (seeds and all, babies). The result was pretty and a faint but lusty purplish-pink. I spread this between the two layers, and then discovered that my square cakes did not have flush edges.
I also made a very simple buttercream frosting: beat the snot out of 0.5 cups room-temperature butter and 0.5 teaspoons vanilla, then beat in - cup by cup - 4.5 cups of confectioner's sugar. Add milk a tablespoon or so at a time until it's the consistency you want. Ohmygod delicious! I think other recipes probably give you a more reliable, pliable frosting, but anything that requires a candy thermometer is too much work. Plus, I don't have a candy thermometer. I made this pretty thin to avoid a crumby massacre.
Initially, I just frosted the cakes in the hopes that the frosting would cover up the unevenness. No go. I made the frosting pretty runny, remember? So I lined up one corner and trimmed two sides. It looks marginally better now, or at least less lumpy. Bits of pink filling and brown cake do show through.
This cake is tasty. The buttermilk (horribly misleading name, blech!) and coffee give it a bitterness that keeps it from tasting cheap, and the texture is lovely. The original recipe recommends a chocolate ganache frosting and filling, but my initial reaction was that such a dark, rich, somber thing would clash a bit with my preppy goals. However, I do not think that the white frosting and fluffy pink filling are a good match for this cake. A delicious raspberry filling, more gelatinous and shiny and dense, would be delicious. Combined with a shiny ganache shell, this cake would be gorgeous...
...and sadly, exactly like the one available at Highland Park Market. Perhaps a chocolate+liquor filling would be better, or an orange or clementine filling. I haven't given up on decorating the top of the cake with darling dots of pink and green icing, but I definitely have some thinking and research to do on the subject. More later.
Invariably, someone in your life, trying to encourage you to like chemistry, will tell you that it's just like cooking. However when chemistry precedes the first buddings of impulses to cook, as it does for me, one might have to say that cooking is like chemistry. And - are you ready, old school SAT fans? - cooking : chemistry :: baking : __?__.
(a) biochem
(b) torture
(c) recess
(d) organic
(e) physics
If you chose (d) organic, congratulations, you agree with me! The parts of organic chemistry that I enjoyed entailed imagining the interactions of molecules and their conformation, which are too eenie-weenie to actually watch or see. However organic chemistry lab was 3 hours per week for 30 total weeks (two semesters) of scheduled anxiety. Chemistry and cooking are similar because one follows a recipe. Organic chemistry and baking represent the same variation on that theme; if you do not follow the instructions to the letter, things go horribly, horribly awry. I am however, a realist on this point: a doughy cookie or an icing that falls apart into a gooey mess is not tragedy on the same scale as a deep lungful of fuming sulfuric acid or a botched sodium fusion test. Some days more than others I might not feel this way, but on the whole I am more leery of a chemically-ravaged esophagus than ravaged sweets.
While the fear of imminent injury made organic chemistry lab into a weekly cortisol-fest, baking gives me just that little thrill of "Oo gosh I hope this comes out yummy!" My friend got me hooked on baking. For two weeks it was Valentine's day cookies: chocolate-dipped marzipan conversation hearts and orange butter cookies dressed alternately in white chocolate, dark chocolate, or white icing were the favorites. With oodles of sprinkles, liberal use of red food coloring, and spiffy food coloring-markers, I ended up with plates and plates of pink chocolatey sugary be-sprinkled atrocities. Oh, they were hedonism itself, drizzled in chocolate.
This past weekend I made peanut butter cookies, but I halved the recipe (yes I used half an egg!) and didn't have any peanut butter chips so I used extra extra chocolate chips. They were superb. And in other news, the notoriously badly-calibrated oven in my kitchen was beautifully-behaved. I also tried the famous Epicurious chocolate cake recipe.
There are some things that you shouldn't do for the first time when it really counts. Jumping on horseback comes to mind, and so do birthday cakes. I have never made a cake of any kind, and Mommy's 45th birthday is in the first week of March, so I needed to practice. My goal is to bake a chocolate cake with a preppy feel: pink and green will be making a cameo appearance. For my practice cake I needed 2, 10x2" round cake pans, which not only did we not have at home, but could not be found at the grocery store. Boo. The grocery store did, however, have boulder-sized hunks of Callebaut. Memorably, my college dining service had used tremendous quantities of Callebaut for Valentine's day displays, and a thieving friend provided me about 1.5 pounds of her bittersweet spoils. In any event, my practice cake is square. I started after dinner and would have finished before the end of the Oscars had the dish washer not taken several eons to give me some clean measuring implements. I had to guesstimate on the amount of chocolate: I bought 0.75 pounds and needed 3 ounces. My mommy helped me with that math. The cakes came out beautifully and slipped cheerfully out of the square pans. I used canola non-stick spray and parchment paper on the inside of (2) 9x9x2" pans.
I chose a whipped cream filling and followed The Joy of Cooking's directions for "Stabilized Whipped Cream" and then added in 0.25 cups of smooshed raspberries (seeds and all, babies). The result was pretty and a faint but lusty purplish-pink. I spread this between the two layers, and then discovered that my square cakes did not have flush edges.
I also made a very simple buttercream frosting: beat the snot out of 0.5 cups room-temperature butter and 0.5 teaspoons vanilla, then beat in - cup by cup - 4.5 cups of confectioner's sugar. Add milk a tablespoon or so at a time until it's the consistency you want. Ohmygod delicious! I think other recipes probably give you a more reliable, pliable frosting, but anything that requires a candy thermometer is too much work. Plus, I don't have a candy thermometer. I made this pretty thin to avoid a crumby massacre.
Initially, I just frosted the cakes in the hopes that the frosting would cover up the unevenness. No go. I made the frosting pretty runny, remember? So I lined up one corner and trimmed two sides. It looks marginally better now, or at least less lumpy. Bits of pink filling and brown cake do show through.
This cake is tasty. The buttermilk (horribly misleading name, blech!) and coffee give it a bitterness that keeps it from tasting cheap, and the texture is lovely. The original recipe recommends a chocolate ganache frosting and filling, but my initial reaction was that such a dark, rich, somber thing would clash a bit with my preppy goals. However, I do not think that the white frosting and fluffy pink filling are a good match for this cake. A delicious raspberry filling, more gelatinous and shiny and dense, would be delicious. Combined with a shiny ganache shell, this cake would be gorgeous...
...and sadly, exactly like the one available at Highland Park Market. Perhaps a chocolate+liquor filling would be better, or an orange or clementine filling. I haven't given up on decorating the top of the cake with darling dots of pink and green icing, but I definitely have some thinking and research to do on the subject. More later.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Blogging, generally
I've never really read any blogs with regularity - except for "Fugly Horse of the Day" - but it seems to me that most people would start off with a post about their purpose, or theme, or a summary of themselves. Despite the fact that the phrase "The wrong lead, on purpose" is scrawled across the top of this blog, I do not consider myself to be especially contrary. So I suppose I'll do the same:
This blog will probably be no more about any one subject than anyone's life is about any one subject. I am 22 years old, and I graduated from college in May. I've never seen a blog about the floaty, wandery weirdness of post-college, pre-real responsibility existence, so I'm writing one. That's not to suggest that I think anyone will, or ought to, read what I write, or that those of us in this uncomfortable stage have much to say that is worth reading about.
Here is what I know about being a grown-up:
1. Grown-uppedness is not something that one can achieve; no one wakes up one day and goes "Hello, adulthood, I have arrived!" Or, such a person surely is not an adult. Decisions and behaviors are either grown-up, or they are not, but I have never heard of a satisfactory definition of what ratio of grown-up-to-not behaviors makes one an adult. Suffice to say there are grown-ups under the age of 18, and not-grown-ups over the age of 80.
2. "Childhood ends with the realization that mommy and daddy are not perfect, and do not have all the answers. Adulthood begins with the realization that nobody is perfect, and there are no answers. Adolescence is the ugly period in between." I wrote that. I think. And I find it elegant.
That's pretty much it; all I know.
This blog will probably be no more about any one subject than anyone's life is about any one subject. I am 22 years old, and I graduated from college in May. I've never seen a blog about the floaty, wandery weirdness of post-college, pre-real responsibility existence, so I'm writing one. That's not to suggest that I think anyone will, or ought to, read what I write, or that those of us in this uncomfortable stage have much to say that is worth reading about.
Here is what I know about being a grown-up:
1. Grown-uppedness is not something that one can achieve; no one wakes up one day and goes "Hello, adulthood, I have arrived!" Or, such a person surely is not an adult. Decisions and behaviors are either grown-up, or they are not, but I have never heard of a satisfactory definition of what ratio of grown-up-to-not behaviors makes one an adult. Suffice to say there are grown-ups under the age of 18, and not-grown-ups over the age of 80.
2. "Childhood ends with the realization that mommy and daddy are not perfect, and do not have all the answers. Adulthood begins with the realization that nobody is perfect, and there are no answers. Adolescence is the ugly period in between." I wrote that. I think. And I find it elegant.
That's pretty much it; all I know.
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